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Bringing Woolly Mammoths and Dinosaurs Back to Life With 3D Printing

Marguerite Humeau is using 3D printing to give a voice to creatures from long ago, specifically from the prehistoric era.

Thanks to the heaps of dinosaur bones scattered across the globe, paleontologists have a vague idea of what dinosaurs looked like when they roamed the earth millions of years ago. But what they sounded like is a tougher nut to crack. Vocal chords are made of soft tissue and cartilage, which means they don’t fossilize. The roars and squawks we hear in movies aren’t exactly made up, but they certainly aren’t based on scientific fact. Marguerite Humeau has spent the last two years working with paleontologists, zoologists, engineers, and doctors to recreate the noises our scaly forebears might have made.

Humeau has chosen to reimagine creatures from three vastly different prehistoric eras: There’s Ambulocetus, or the “walking whale,” a Cetacean that could swim and walk over 50 million years before our time. Entelodont (also known as *shiver* Hell Pig) was a massive omnivore that roamed more than 20 million years ago. The youngest is Mammoth Imperator, the species of giant mammoth that Humeau recreated for her graduation show in 2011.

Using a combination of her artistic intuition and scientific data, Humeau is creating the voice boxes of these creatures, and subsequently building a new library of animal sounds never before heard in the modern era.

The video below, entitled “Proposal for resuscitating prehistoric creatures,” sets up the rebirth of cloned creatures, their wandering and their sound epic.